Gregg Hurwitz – New York Times Bestselling Authorhttp://gregghurwitz.net
Gregg Hurwitz is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Tower, Minutes to Burn, Do No Harm, The Kill Clause, The Program,Mon, 24 Jul 2017 21:32:43 +0000en-UShourly1Book Club Questions for TELL NO LIEShttp://gregghurwitz.net/2014/10/book-club-questions-for-tell-no-lies/
http://gregghurwitz.net/2014/10/book-club-questions-for-tell-no-lies/#commentsThu, 16 Oct 2014 15:13:30 +0000http://gregghurwitz.net/?p=3791Read more »]]>Readers wrote to me requesting questions for their book club, which are reading Tell No Lies. So here’s a list I wrote up. Happy reading!

1. What is the nature of deception? Is it worse to lie to others or lie to yourself? How do the characters, especially Daniel, hide the truth from themselves?

2. How is the theme of accountability played out in the group therapy sessions and in the plot at large?

3. How are Daniel’s annoying sanctimonious neighbors tied thematically to the book?

4. Is San Francisco a character in the book? What does that mean?

5. Are Daniel’s ethics different from what he believes them to be? In certain circumstances, would your own ethical choices surprise you? What would you do about the medical trial if you were in his position?

5. Evelyn is a brutal character but also dead honest. Contrast her to Daniel. To Cris.

DON’T LOOK BACK is almost here!

Eve Hardaway is on a trip she has always dreamed of in the jungles and mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. During the tour Eve wanders off the trail, to a house in the distance with a man in the yard beyond it, throwing machetes at a human-shaped target. On her way back, she finds a prescription bottle and camera, containing a photo of that same menacing looking man, both marked with the name Teresa Hamilton. Teresa Hamilton has since disappeared, and the man in the woods is after whoever was snooping around his house. A storm has the tour group trapped in the jungle with a dangerous predator with a secret to protect. With her only resource her determination to live, Eve must fight a dangerous foe and survive against incredible odds—if she’s to make it back home alive.

I am thrilled that DON’T LOOK BACK has received so many great reviews so far:

“A taut, smart, suspense-filled ride to satisfy the most discerning of thrill seekers.”

–Library Journal, Starred Review

“Hurwitz again proves himself a plot master as he adds to his string of imaginative thrillers with an action adventure story ready for blockbuster Hollywood-get Cameron Diaz’s people!”

–Kirkus Reviews

“A book you will want to read non-stop to the end. [It] will be on your mind for days after you finish it!”

If I’m not coming to your city this year, you’re able to order signed copies through any of the independent bookstores I’m visiting. If you contact them prior to my signing date, I’ll be happy to personalize your copy!

Please send your mailing address to info(at)kayepublicity(dot)com and they’ll send your copy of TELL NO LIES. If you didn’t win this round, you can still order your copy from one of these retailers.

]]>http://gregghurwitz.net/2014/07/and-the-winners-are/feed/2A Goodybe to Batman: The Dark Knighthttp://gregghurwitz.net/2013/12/a-goodybe-to-batman-the-dark-knight/
http://gregghurwitz.net/2013/12/a-goodybe-to-batman-the-dark-knight/#commentsThu, 12 Dec 2013 15:32:52 +0000http://gregghurwitz.net/?p=3110Read more »]]>Batman is forever, but sadly not all of his titles are. Batman: The Dark Knight will be ending with Issue 29. When I first signed on to do a single arc with David Finch, I never imagined I’d stay this long. Because of my work in novels and screenplays, I’m rarely sure what sorts of deadlines I’ll be juggling at any time, so I usually commit to a single six-issue story at a time and write way out ahead of schedule. DC has been great and gracious about accommodating this, and because of their flexibility, I wound up writing on the title for two (really damn fun) years.

The Bat-office has been terrific, and I want to thank Mike Marts and the other host of DC folks (Geoff Johns, Rickey Purdin, Darren Shaw in particular) who lent support over these past years, as well as my stellar colleagues on the writing side—Scott Snyder, Peter Tomasi, Gail Simone, JH Williams III, Kyle Higgins, and so many more I overlapped with. Sonia Oback, Brian Miller of Hi-Fi, Dave McCaig, and John Kalisz did fantastic work on colors, and Dezi Sienty provided expert lettering for much of the run.

In particular, I’m grateful to my artists—first and foremost David Finch. He originated this book, initially handling both writing and drawing duties, and he’s the one who first invited me to the dance. We had a blast with our depiction of the delightfully wicked Mr. Crane and we hope you did too. I loved working with Ethan Van Badass on our Hatter arc, and later with Alex Maleev, who drew Clayface with skillful, staticky delight. The annual and a few fill-in issues saw me reunited with my Penguin: Pain and Prejudice artist, Szymon Kudranski. Looking at that roster of names, I’m pleased to say that Batman gave me opportunity to work with some of the finest comic book artists in the world. Thanks, boys. And thanks, Mr. Wayne.

It’s been almost four years ago to the day that I sat down for a breakfast meeting with Dan DiDio. DC had put out some feelers to me, wondering if I might be interested in doing a project over there. So when Dan asked what sounded fun, I told him I really wanted to do a Penguin story. I don’t think this was the answer he was expecting, but I’d recently read Azzarello and Bermejo’s superb Joker and I thought they really elevated the game with what they did there (plus, I love my villains). To my delight, DC said yes, and some months later we announced the project to what I can only describe as a resounding lack of enthusiasm in the Blogosphere (or whatever more contemporary noun has replaced the Blogosphere). I remember one contest rating upcoming titles had poor Oswald pulling a mere .07% of the vote. And this is where I get to my last and biggest thank you—to the readers.

It was you guys who picked up Penguin and through word of mouth turned it into the commercial and critical success it was. It was you who put TDK consistently way up there on bestsellers charts, landing us at the top of the New York Times hardcover graphic novel list. And it’s been your enthusiasm and energy that’s made my run on the title one of the most gratifying jobs I’ve ever had.

Before we take our bow, we still have great stuff in store for you. The gifted Alberto Ponticelli will be bringing to life a two-parter that is very dear to my heart. And our Dark Knight finale issues will see my good buddy Van Sciver introducing a Man-Bat you’ve never seen before.

I have more coming up beyond the title as well. I’m honored to be contributing to the Detective #27 anniversary issue with a story drawn by Neal Adams, and I’m hoping we’ll find more excuses for me to dive into Batcave beyond that. But for the moment, I want to dim the Bat-Signal and thank you all for supporting Batman: The Dark Knight. The ride would not have been possible without you.

On my tour for TELL NO LIES, I read this little rant about the City a few times. In a way, it’s a counterpart to the imagined journey Drew Danner takes across Los Angeles in The Crime Writer. I’ve been asked about it quite a bit so I thought I’d share it with readers here.

People talk about place as character. And that’s always a little vague. But I think a place serves as a character when you have a story that could only take place there. Imagine Mystic River if it wasn’t set in Boston. Or LA Requiem taking place in Portland. When it came time to write this novel, I had a scenario flirting with me that dealt with class and race, which function differently in San Francisco than anywhere else. And as this notion evolved, I realized it was finally the story that would take me home.

If there’s one city that can go up against LA for being steeped in a crime-fiction tradition, it would be the city in which I was born. San Francisco. Since moving to LA, I’ve adopted it in every way—except I kept the Giants, which was a wise move up until about two months ago.

I’m annoyed that wherever I travel, I have to defend Los Angeles against accusations of smog and silicone implants, materialism and quinoa diets—but San Francisco, that’s a city everyone loves. I grew up in the South Bay, so I knew San Francisco from a bit of a distance—day trips here and there, longer outings on occasion. But for Tell No Lies, I finally went back and reacquainted myself with—as we called it growing up—the City. As someone once said, if you get tired walking around San Francisco, you can always lean against it. And I spent lots of time driving and walking and leaning.

My hero, Daniel Brasher, comes from one of San Francisco’s richest founding families, and he’s just been injured and pulled into the midst of a horrific murder that gives him pause and forces him to see the city through a different lens. Let’s pick him up on his drive home:

—

The sun broke across the horizon, fanning a sheet of gold through the iconic skyline. Daniel was weary, half asleep behind the wheel, the early morning haze of the city a match for the early morning haze muffling the steady throb in his head. He cut past the Castro, where Latina drag queens in fishnets and feathers paraded the sidewalks, strutting past bars with inventively uninventive names—The Lonely Bull, The Missouri Mule, Dirty Dick’s. He kept on, skirting the edge of the Haight, where painted VW buses and druggie runaways littered the curbs, in search of a lost decade. During the Summer of Love, Janis Joplin strummed her Gibson in a one-room flop pad here, a tambourine throw from where the Grateful Dead commune tuned in and dropped out. Relics of each era endured, strata-layered in store fronts, charting the evolution from beatniks to hippies to yuppies to fauxhemians.

Forging north, Daniel sliced through Alamo Square, its picket row of pastel Victorians basking in the first pink-tinged rays of the new day. Beyond their fanciful gingerbread gables rose the green-copper dome of City Hall, where ousted Catholic and local sandlotter-made-good Joe DiMaggio said I do to Marilyn, and where, a couple of decades later, five hollow-point bullets cut down Harvey Milk in the corridors of power. So much glory and shame. So much beauty and horror. A city that burned to the ground six times before its first decade flamed out, yet rose from the ashes again and again, a boxer who wouldn’t stay down.

He let his imagination soar across the rooftops to the Tenderloin where dealers in saggy pants palmed baggies into skeletal hands, and tranny hookers batted improbable eyelashes and held cigarettes to their smeared lips, smoking off the night’s work. Mere blocks to yet another ecosystem—capitalism-clean Union Square on perennial high polish, ornate Christmas displays already gleaming in the vast picture windows, Neiman and Chanel, Saks and the ghost of I. Magnin. Coppola shot the conversation in The Conversation here, but even his surveillance camera couldn’t capture the dead-end alley where Miles Archer met his fictional demise or the Palace Hotel, where President Harding was felled by an enlarged heart or a poisonous wife.

A Peter Pan drift took Daniel to Russian Hill with its manic slalom descents, its vertiginous tumble over the brink of Filbert, its manicured floral gardens cupping the curves of Lombard, the second crookedest street in the city. Steve McQueen’s Mustang scorched these slopes in the world’s greatest car chase, the fleeing Charger losing an unlikely six hubcaps in the process.

Then on to North Beach in all its gaudy Italian glory. There perched City Lights Bookstore, where Ginsberg howled, the wedged façade gazing nobly across the intersection at the world’s first topless bar, if the historical plaque is to be believed. Carol Doda bared her double-d Twin Peaks here at the Condor Club, a skip from Green Street where Philo T. Farnsworth lived up to his madcap inventor’s name and conjured into existence the world’s first TV. And overseeing all this squalid, soaring history, the fluted column of Coit Tower, the candle stuck in the cupcake of Telegraph Hill.

All those tales of the city. All those separate lives. Misfits and dreamers, transplants and immigrants, victims and outlaws, packed full of hidden fears and sordid impulses, inflated fantasies and rageful desires. They’d come heeding the siren’s call, seeking haven, to this sanctuary city thrust into a swirl of ever-shifting tides and mist. A peninsula draped over seven hills, twinkling and glorious, with jutting heights and precipitous drops, a labyrinthine fog-veiled confusion of one-ways and narrow alleys, shadow and light. A microcosm of the human psyche in all its splendor and horror, its seething, brilliant, hideous capabilities.

So many places to hide. So many ways to disappear. All those masks, imagined and real.

Sharing a room with violent offenders is an occupational hazard for probation counselor Daniel Brasher. One night he finds an envelope – one intended for someone else – that was placed in his office mailbox by accident. Inside is an unsigned piece of paper, a handwritten note that says “admit what you’ve done or you will bleed for it.” The deadline in the note has already passed and when Daniel looks into it, he finds that the person to whom the envelope was addressed was brutally murdered. But that’s just the beginning. As the warnings increase, Daniel finds he must outwit a relentless killer who now has him and his family in his sights.

Thank you to all the readers and the International Thriller Writers who shortlisted THE SURVIVOR for the big “Thriller of the Year” award. It’s quite an honor, as the book joins the 3rd best-of list for 2012.

If Gregg’s not coming to your city this year, you’re able to order signed copies through any of the independent bookstores he’s visiting. If you contact them prior to his signing date, he’ll be happy to personalize your copy!

For fellow comic book geeks, the work continues on BATMAN: The Dark Knight with a Mad Hatter arc. DC Comics recently ran a story on Gregg’s villains and the reasons that we enjoy reading about the bad guys.

Principal photography has ended for CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, a sexy thriller movie Gregg was brought on board for as a writer. Director Elizabeth Allen and the talented cast are doing an amazing job bringing this story to life. More details here.

For frequent updates and contests, follow me on Twitter and “Like” me on Facebook.

]]>http://gregghurwitz.net/2013/06/june-6-2013-newsletter/feed/0Tim Rackley Forewordhttp://gregghurwitz.net/2013/01/tim-rackley-foreword/
http://gregghurwitz.net/2013/01/tim-rackley-foreword/#commentsMon, 21 Jan 2013 15:03:48 +0000http://gregghurwitz.net/?p=2305Read more »]]>So I have this tattered yellow notebook of the spiral variety from high school, the kind which sheds chads of paper at the faintest rustling. As an aspiring author, I used to write down snatches of dialogue, plot ideas, and my first clunky attempts at scenes. There might be a few opinions in there as well about unattainable girls and other matters social, the dark nights of the soul that a prep school kid believes he’s suffering through.

But one scrawled thought stayed with me all these years. It asked: What if there was some group devoted to cleaning up criminals who got off due to loopholes in the justice system?

A cool, high-concept idea. But high-concept ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s when they collide with the right character that they actually have the legs to turn into a story. And writing a tale about another off-the-tracks loose cannon? Well, it seemed banal.

So I finished high-school. Went off to college. Studied in England while completing my first thriller. I was fortunate enough to sell that book. I published a second. And a third. And then, one day, I met the character to go with that decade-old scrawled note.

I don’t recall the precise moment, but I remember the thoughts striking, one after another: What if there was a guy who was one of the most ethical law enforcement officers you could imagine? Maybe his father was a con artist and this guy spent his life craving the straight and narrow the way a preacher’s son might crave a card game. And then, what if something awful, truly awful knocked him off course? Wouldn’t that be a vigilante we’d be more interested in? One who started from a position of vigorous moral authority? One who doubted his actions at every step, who never gave in fully to the dark urges, who might even, at some point, change his mind?

Tim Rackley.

And Dray. Dray was my answer to every annoying cop’s wife I ever read in a book or saw on TV or film—the hysterical ones who always complain that the job’s killing her husband. That’s he’s taking too many risks and why can’t he just stop caring so much, damnit, and focus more on home.

Andrea Rackley, she ain’t like that. She’s a sheriff’s deputy, tough as hell, a resource in her own right. Quite often, she’s more level-headed than her husband. Their relationship is one I admire, and it taught me about marriage before I was married. They banter and argue, fight and make up, but always, always get a kick out of each other.

I wrote four Rackley books: The Kill Clause (2003), The Program (2004), Troubleshooter (2005), and Last Shot (2006). They’re old friends of mine now, Tim and Dray. They’re family. And I’m glad that you’ll have a chance to see them arguing through the particulars of a case, staring down danger, doing what they do.

]]>http://gregghurwitz.net/2013/01/tim-rackley-foreword/feed/5Batman Variant Cover Giveawayhttp://gregghurwitz.net/2012/07/variant-cover-giveaway/
http://gregghurwitz.net/2012/07/variant-cover-giveaway/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2012 18:06:36 +0000http://gregghurwitz.net/?p=2185Read more »]]>“THE SURVIVOR is the greatest book yet, from one of the best crime novelists in the business. It opens fast and never slows down. It kept me up all night—I just couldn’t stop reading.” – David Finch

Fellow Comic Book Geeks and Batheads,

Wanna get your hands on a signed variant cover of BATMAN: The Dark Knight #10? (It’s a really cool sideways front-and-back cover of David Finch’s insane Batman/Scarecrow image).

One lucky winner will receive a rare, limited edition of TDK #10, signed, sealed, and delivered.

Not a comic book reader? You can still enter to win! Just promise to give the comic to the kid next door. Or to your grown cousin who just got back from Comic-Con. Or to the middle-aged lady on the subway who we all know secretly digs Batman, too.

Entries must be received by Friday, August 17th. The winner will be announced on Monday, August 20th.

]]>http://gregghurwitz.net/2012/07/variant-cover-giveaway/feed/2Should I Write a Book, You Ask? My Advice to People Thinking About Becoming Writers.http://gregghurwitz.net/2012/05/should-i-write-a-book-you-ask-my-advice-to-people-thinking-about-becoming-writers/
http://gregghurwitz.net/2012/05/should-i-write-a-book-you-ask-my-advice-to-people-thinking-about-becoming-writers/#commentsFri, 25 May 2012 18:41:02 +0000http://gregghurwitz.net/?p=2021Read more »]]>This is an email response I wrote to an acquaintance who, having survived a personal crisis, was debating turning some of her writings into a book. I thought my response to her questions might prove helpful to other folks out there debating if they should write a book.

—

Strung together journal entries won’t work. They might make for a blog, but not a book. To write a book you have to write a book that is clearly a book and adheres to all the conventions and requirements of being a book. This is a shit-ton of work and will take drafts and time and sweat and blood until it’s either good enough to submit or you give up. As one of my writer buddies says: One of these will happen first.

Unless you’re Whitney Houston’s daughter or the guy who cut his arm off with a pocket-knife, no publisher or agent will be interested in talking to you until you’ve written a manuscript. Since you’ve never written a manuscript, how good that manuscript is will be all that matters. So. Go to your bookshelves and look at all the novels or memoirs or inspirational/self-help books that you’ve read and loved, pick the appropriate format for your story, then start to create a manuscript along those lines. Set a high bar. It will have to be as good as your favorite books on your shelves, the ones that changed your life. As for what angle to take or how to approach it – that’s on you. It’s your life, your book, and your vision. No one else will care to tell you how to approach it, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t be right since it’s your (highly personal) story to tell. Some jackass might tell you it must be second-person haiku but in your gut it’s a first person memoir. Which are you gonna write? Also, people who have experience don’t necessarily know what’s right for you. Your job is to have vision and to realize that vision in ink and paper in a fashion that will make that particular order of words on the pages the one in five hundred collections of words on pages that an agent will stake his or her livelihood and reputation on that month. And then that an editor, from the agent-culled collections of words on pages, will pick from worse odds to stake even more on. This may sound discouraging, but if you’re really a writer, it won’t matter. If you’re really a writer, you don’t have a choice anyway. Be bold and venture forth. And good luck.

]]>http://gregghurwitz.net/2012/05/should-i-write-a-book-you-ask-my-advice-to-people-thinking-about-becoming-writers/feed/12Tim Rackley Heads to TNThttp://gregghurwitz.net/2012/03/tim-rackley-heads-to-tnt/
http://gregghurwitz.net/2012/03/tim-rackley-heads-to-tnt/#respondFri, 16 Mar 2012 13:38:40 +0000http://gregghurwitz.net/?p=1991Read more »]]>I’m thrilled to announce that I will be developing my Tim Rackley books (THE KILL CLAUSE, THE PROGRAM) as a TV series for Sony/TNT. I’m teaming up with my good buddy and talented show runner, Shawn Ryan, who wrote/produced great shows like The Shield, Terriers, and The Chicago Code.